Paul Ryan's Healthcare Bill Would Quietly Make It Harder for Women to Get Abortions

The Republicans' bill doesn't ban abortion, but it makes the procedure functionally impossible for TrumpCare beneficiaries to pay for.

The reviews of Paul Ryan's healthcare reform bill are rolling in, and they are—spoiler alert—not good. In fact, it's such a poorly-drafted, profoundly ill-advised piece of legislation that not even the Bannon minions at Breitbart News are impressed. Even for a man whose passion for finding new and innovative ways to get owned knows no bounds, this is an impressive accomplishment. But Ryan's callous, disingenuous proposal doesn't just take healthcare away from millions of poor people. Trumpcare also quietly eviscerates abortion rights in the United States—not by making the procedure illegal, but by making it functionally impossible to pay for.

The GOP has long threatened to defund Planned Parenthood, but this time around, they are trying to keep their efforts to do so under the radar. The bill prohibits states from paying subsidies to a "prohibited entity," a term defined to mean any entity that "provides for abortions" other than those performed in the case of rape or incest, or when the mother's health is in jeopardy. As the Los Angeles Times' Michael Hiltzik points out, the list of entities that this fancy bit legal jargon actually affects starts and ends with "Planned Parenthood"—just like Ryan promised.

TrumpCare doesn't stop there, though. Republicans are crowing about how their proposal will provide Americans with greater "choice" by giving them a portable tax credit to help defray the costs of insurance. What they are discussing far less is the fact that this tax credit is not available to pay for any insurance policy that covers abortion—whether or not the individual ever gets one, or even thinks about it. Hiltzik explains the consequences. (They are bad.)

This would dramatically shrink working Americans’ access to
insurance-covered abortions, or would lead to insurers dropping
abortion coverage from their plans, or both. Customers could buy
separate policies to cover abortions, but couldn’t use the federal
subsidy to help pay for them. Insurers likely would charge hugely
discouraging premiums for such policies, as the market for them would
be tiny.

Never fear, America! Paul Ryan is here to provide you greater flexibility to choose your healthcare! Unless you are a person who believes that women should have autonomy over the choices they make about their own bodies, in which case, no, that's not the type of "freedom" afforded by this proposal. Look at this helpful FAQ published by House Republicans that, incredibly, places these two questions next to each other:

Did you catch that? Republicans can't prohibit abortion, since they still haven't found a neat way around that Supreme Court thing. And they're so terrified of the backlash that would follow if they defunded Planned Parenthood altogether that the White House recently promised the organization that it could keep its federal funding if it would voluntarily stop providing abortion services—effectively holding hostage millions of dollars' worth of cancer prevention and disease screening services. (Planned Parenthood was having none of this proposal, obviously.) What they can do, however, is destroy the private market for health insurance that covers abortion services, by barring the millions of individuals who they claim their proposal "helps" from buying such policies in the first place.

TrumpCare isn't about flexibility or choice. Instead, it uses healthcare reform as a vessel to quietly do something that Paul Ryan and his buddies otherwise lack the ability or conviction to accomplish. And while House Republicans unapologetically take away lifesaving healthcare services from their constituents, they have the nerve to tell women that they should be grateful for the "freedom" they've been so graciously afforded. In an administration defined by its cowardice and cruelty, this maneuver still manages to stand out.

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